ELI5: The last Aaron Swartz question. Why don't we have access to publicly funded scientific journals that hide behind pay walls? Is there anything we can do about it?

Traditionally academics must publish in good journals or die.

Good journals are the sole gatekeepers and they blackmail academics to sign over copyright as a condition of publication.

Journals have been hoovered up by the megacorp Elsevier to eliminate competition - so market forces do not apply.

The science is public research, paid for by taxpayers - but the results are stolen from the public domain by these corporate bullies.

The profits are greedy to the point of evil and the crappy concessions to open access are tawdry.

'For the most part, as a scientist, I don't know why anyone outside the academy would want to read scientific papers anyway.' - because I want to do science you ivory towered arrogant nit ;) - an awful lot of people want to outside the academies do - if you haven't yet realized the huge amount of citizen science going on these days then quite soon you won't know what has hit you - and you are missing out.

Perhaps it hasn't hit your field , because it is a walled garden ? Try getting your peers to publish in arxiv.

A more cynical view would be academics love the quiet of no one really paying attention except those on the same gravy train.

'But if you do, you can always go to your local university library.' - IMHO this is highly non trivial to gain access as a member of the public and puts a lot of barriers in the way of immediately reading a quick reference someones send you, text search and getting a copy.

And why in heck should I go to a physical place to read an un-copyable document ?

This is so inefficient by so many orders of magnitude - it is not as if it isn't hard enough being a citizen scientist.

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